When Yongman Kim closed his eclectic video store in Manhattan, he found a new home for the more than 55,000 films in Sicily.

By SOPHIA HOLLANDER


In 1987, when a Korean immigrant named Yongman Kim opened a movie rental store in the East Village of Manhattan, he began with 8,000 films, from the odd to the adored. It quickly became a local institution.

Over the years, Mr. Kim built a staff that traveled the world scouring for additional titles - the only way to find obscure films in the pre-Internet age. By 2008, the collection had swelled to 55,000 eclectic works, many impossible to find anywhere else.

Then the world changed.

The Internet had spawned Netflix, an online DVD-by-mail service. It also distracted consumers, stealing hours they might once have spent reveling in movies.

At the now-closed store’s peak in the 1990s, more than 200,000 people were listed in the Kim’s Video database, but by the end of last year, only about 1,500 of them were considered active members.

Last September, Mr. Kim issued a public challenge. In a notice pasted on a wall inside the front door, he wrote,“We hope to find a sponsor who can make this collection available to those who have loved Kim’s over the past two decades.”He promised to donate all the films without charge to anyone who would meet three conditions: Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others.

Offers poured in. Every one failed on one count or another. Every offer, that is, except one.

The month that Mr. Kim posted his notice, a 42-year-old Italian graphic designer named Franca Pauli found herself intrigued by an article in La Repubblica, one of Italy’s national newspapers.

According to the report, an ancient town in western Sicily called Salemi had initiated an unusual renewal project. Since a devastating earthquake in 1968, the town’s historic center sat abandoned. Now, an ambitious effort was under way to reverse the damage.

The town had invited prominent artists and intellectuals to assume control of the government. An art critic and onetime anarchist named Vittorio Sgarbi was elected mayor. The provocative Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani was named alderman of creativity.

Ms. Pauli had worked with Mr. Toscani years earlier. Now, as president of a small arts foundation called Clio, she was fascinated by this effort to give artists political power.

Two months later, she and her family traveled to Salemi from their home near Venice for a quick, investigatory vacation. After a dizzying three days of questions, conversations and exchanged business cards, Ms. Pauli returned home determined to suggest an artistic project of her own. She learned of Kim’s challenge through an acquiaintance in graduate school in New York.

Ms. Pauli e-mailed Mr. Kim, eager to gauge whether he would even consider an offer from Italy. He would, he told her, but only if the offer were serious.

“You’re thinking,‘I’m sure someone from New York will take the collection,’so I was trying to be really cautious,”Ms. Pauli said.“But I also thought, maybe this community that’s coming about in Salemi could be the right place after all to understand this, this amazing collection.”

As details about the possible arrangement leaked out, some of Kim’s customers took the news as a second, more serious blow. Some of them even confronted Mr. Kim in the store and by phone, challenging him to find a way to keep the movies in the community, or at least on the continent.

And he says he tried.

“Until the last minute,”Mr. Kim said,“I was still waiting for some decent offer. It was very disappointing.”

Slowly he was won over by the enthusiasm of Ms. Pauli and the new team in charge in Salemi.

“When I saw that we could have this collection,”said Mr. Toscani, director of the town’s Department of Creativity,“I thought it would be a great adventure, a great project.”

His team is working on special provisions for Kim’s members who venture to Salemi, including free access to films and discounted places to stay.

Mr. Kim, for his part, still gets daily calls from irate customers. But he knows that for his collection, bright days may lie ahead 4,800 kilometers away.

And as for his former customers in the East Village, he said,“One day, I hope they understand.”